509 Quotes by Philip Roth

I saw that everything you say says either more than you wanted it to say or less than you wanted it to say. What you said and did made a difference, all right, but not the difference you intended.

I turn sentences around. That’s my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again...

At a certain stage of misery, you’ll try anything to explain what’s going on with you, even if you know it doesn’t explain a thing and it’s one failed explanation after another.

Of a terrible, the incomprehensible way one’s most banal, incidental, even comical choices archive the most disproportionate result.

Here in America either it’s Faunia Farley or it’s Monica Lewinsky! The luxury of these lives disquieted so by the inappropriate comportment of Clinton and Silk!

Actually we did not have the feelings we said we had until we spoke them – at least I didn’t; to phrase them was to invent them and own them.

All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing.

Anyone with brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

How much time could you spend staring out the ocean, even if it was the ocean you’d loved since you were a boy?